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The Sect of the Witch

The church was fucking freezing. This was a fucking stupid idea.

Chloe’s eyes sought out the shapes of her friends, shadowy figures on a background of blackness. Maddie was fumbling with the matches as Lucas stood loyally beside her, holding out the candles. Finally after three failed attempts she managed to light them and a little of the darkness fell away.

Sure, black fishnets and corsets seem glamorous when you’re drawing them in your math’s textbook, but the reality, she was discovering, is very different. Chloe hadn’t expected the boning to dig so far into the soft flesh under her breasts. And she certainly hadn’t expected it to be this cold. Goosebumps and corned-beef skin are not tragically alluring, she thought, staring wistfully down at her quivering, unhappy flesh.

Overhead the church rood flickered and wavered in the candlelight like a sinister mirage. The whole place had a damp, abandoned smell.

Since Maddie had watched The Sect of the Witch she had been very taken with this idea of nailing her colours to the Satanic mast by conducting a black mass ‘somewhere Jesusy’ as she put it. This would, she claimed, put them all so far beyond redemption that they’d be summoning demons in no time.

“No more having your head flushed down the toilet. No more having to pay for Harriet Pengelly’s second pudding every day - with demons on our side, they’ll have to leave us alone.”

Maddie was determined. Chloe just liked the clothes.

They clustered near the stone sarcophagi at the back, arms outstretched and bravely pretending not to shiver. Lucas, acting as High Priest, began to intone the words that Maddie had copied from The Sect of the Witch, his voice fleshing out the darkness.

Slowly, Chloe felt the trace of ridiculousness begin to trickle away. As Lucas continued to chant a sense of calmness, of power began to steal over her. The darkness wasn’t impenetrable now; she wore it like a cape, draped over her pale bare arms. The church began to thrum with a kind of wild energy.

Chloe looked over. Maddie could feel it too. Her friend’s face was upturned with a rapturous smile plastered across it.

Then, something on one of the sarcophagi began, unmistakably, to move.

A figure, vaguely human but, hunched and broken with horrible, ragged wings began to rise from the shadow of the grave, a high-pitched, maniacal cackle reverberating around the space. Maddie wasn’t smiling now; the three of them fell over one another in their hurry to escape from whatever it was they had summoned.

“Fucks sake I didn’t think it’d fucking work” bellowed Lucas, shoving Chloe aside in his rush to leave.

Chloe was the last to reach the door. She flung a glance behind her; the candles still flickered around the graves and she saw, standing in the centre a very dirty, naked old man, holding open his trenchcoat and absolutely pissing himself with laughter.

Chloe opened her mouth to call to the others, to reassure them that they hadn’t summoned hellspawn, just woken an old tramp. But then, thinking better of it, she closed it again, saying nothing, just watching her friends flailing, panicked through the cemetery. She was fairly sure they wouldn’t be going back to the church any time soon...

Jonny Jumpknees

Pretty little birdy sitting in the tree, feathers so bright, singing a song that floats across the fields and drops like honey balm. Down at the bottom of the well, sitting in the slime is Jonny Jumpknees. It is dark down there, but the sweet song reaches even his weary ears, or that is to say, the holes where his ears used to be. Johnny Jumpknees had all the bits required to be human once upon a time but now they have rotted away or cling on with thread-like sinews and clotted blood. Once he was Jonathan Jackson and a fine looking fellow, six feet tall with a mop of auburn hair. As a child he was a sweet looking boy with freckles, dimples and curls, the whole Shirley Temple deal and the ladies of the town fussed and doted.

However, his daddy was a cunt. It turns out there are only so many beatings and incestuous fumblings a person can take before it alters them, before their heart splits and their soul decays. Jonathan Jackson’s descent began by showing his tiny pre-pubescent glans to the small girls and boys in the playground. Five years later he would jump from behind bushes and walls and reveal himself to any female that happened past. No matter how many times he did it and no matter how many times those women screamed and cried and ran to the police, nothing appeared to happen to Jonathan. His father was the priest and used his not inconsiderable influence to keep the law at bay. Jonathan Jackson was untouchable and exerted a low hum of fear over the townsfolk. He became known as Jonny Jumpknees because of the strange hop and skip he used to confront the town’s nanas, aunties, mums, sisters and daughters. It wasn’t the fact of their gender that made them targets, it was their significance in relation to their men, for Jonny Jumpknees hated men.

Whilst the law of the land may have been looking in another direction, inside Jonny’s house Gods own law was being applied with increasing vigour. The more God chastised Johnny the more he paraded his priapic glory, finding new and creative ways to reveal himself to mitigate his own pain. Consequently, as is Gods way of course, the more furious was his punishment.

One day Johnny could take it no more. Finding himself delivered of a mighty strength he caved in the priestly cranium with a cruciform paperweight. As the adrenaline seeped away Jonny was left with a numb absence where the anger used to be, and he felt quite dead. Knowing that there was no daddy to keep the police away Jonny fled out of the back gate and ran for miles. In the dark he did not see the well and tumbled headlong to the bottom. Even had he wanted to escape he could not. There was a trickle of dirty water and enough drowned protein in that wretched mud to keep him just a little bit alive. There Jonny Jumpknees stayed, hating the little yellow birdy and the patch of sky above him. He became a hideous decayed bogey man for the children in the town who were told his tale as a warning and who told their children in turn. It was the tale of Jonny Jumpknees who found out that two wrongs do not make a right.

The Locked Room Pt 2

(Continued from last week)

I climbed down from the tree and grabbed ahold of the lock.

“It’s locked onto some kind of board, you idiot,” Evelina said in her Russian accent with a Texas twang. She sounds drunk when she talks. And she’s mean, too.

I swept the dirt away with my black Adidas.

“It’s not a board. It’s a door.” I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Well don’t just stand there looking like Forest Gump. Open it up!”

“It’s fucking locked, E.” And with that I gave an exaggerated tug on the lock. A dull click snapped through the air and I flew backward onto my ass. Evelina began snorting like a deranged pig.

“Are you ok, Kat?” she asked, swinging down from the tree and helping me to my feet. My ass wasn’t as sore as my ego.

“Damn thing broke apart on me.” I tossed the lock into the grass. Evelina reached down and grabbed a metal handle sticking out of the door. She pulled hard, her muscles in her back straining tight in the dawning light. The door opened and a pool of darkness spilled out from the square hole.

I got on my hands and knees, peering into the black abyss, my eyes straining with the effort.

“Let’s find out where it goes!” Evelina was lowering herself into the hole before she finished her sentence.

“E, if you get us raped by a serial killer, I’ll kill you!” I shouted down into the hole.

“That makes no sense, Kat,” came her voice from the dark.” It’s a tunnel!”

I wasn’t going to let my best friend ghost hunt without me. I dangled from the lip of the door before dropping down, my feet hitting packed earth.

We took the tunnel together, guided by light bulbs suspended from the ceiling. They gave off a yellow, dusty glow. The tunnel smelled of earth and beef jerky.

The tunnel moved steadily downward, twisting and turning, the soft light guiding us onward. For the first time since I’d met Evelina in the second grade, she didn’t utter a word.

Ahead of us, we heard a sound like a man moaning, followed by scraped metal. The light pushed out of the darkness with a dull ache.

We slowed, listening intently. I could smell Evelina’s skin, sweating out the cucumber water she’d been drinking early that morning.

“Can I lick your skin?” I asked. Evelina stopped in tracks.

“Can you not be creepy while we’re walking through a dimly lit underground tunnel toward certain death, please?” She turned her back toward me and kept moving.

“Sorry, I’m just thirsty,” I said, hugging her close.

We crept to the end of the tunnel and peaked around the corner. A man stood naked, flashing us with foul smelling and rotting flesh. His neck was collared by a thick metal ring attached to a chain into the wall. His skin was sliding off his face, his teeth chipped and exposed.

A door to our right, inside the room, suddenly opened and the two of us jumped backward into the tunnel. A priest appeared, a large golden cross in one hand, his other slinging holy water from a bottle, chanting in tongues. The zombie groaned loudly and attempted to grab the priest, his penis flaccid and decayed, looking more like a headless, bloodied duck.

(To be continued)

Good time girl

Sergeant Johnson took a deep breath before going into the interview room. He was an old school copper, call a spade a spade, and now, thanks to thirteen separate visits with the diversity officer, call his daughter’s girlfriend Alison.

But this was different. This was going too far. These…people. These things. In didn’t matter how many seminars they sent him on. You couldn’t call what was waiting for him in the interview room a man.

Sergeant Johnson entered the room and took a seat opposite the suspect and his solicitor. Both of them were dark skinned, and both were sporting smug, knowing smiles. Johnson shuffled through his papers, cleared his throat, and then began.

Mister Ishalla, shall we get right down to it? You’ve been arrested and charged with indecent exposure. We have a dozen witnesses. How about you make both our lives easier and cop to it.’

‘Can’t even do me the courtesy of looking at me?’

Johnson didn’t spare him a glance. He waved his stack of papers.

‘Six statements, all saying the same thing: a voice in the dark shouting – hey Mrs, get a load of this – and then a man matching your description jumped out and opened his raincoat. There was a doctor there, a priest. Six upstanding members of the community have made sworn statements that you’re a dirty old flasher.’

Johnson finally looked.

Ishalla steepled his fingers together. He smiled to reveal two rows of perfect brown teeth.

‘Death comes to us all, and perhaps you too will one day be fortunate to join the ranks of the undead.’

‘Maybe,’ Johnson said. ‘But I won’t become a sex pervert.’

‘That’s slander, that is.’ Ishalla stood. He lowered his trousers, and Johnson found himself looking at nothing. This man, this thing, this zombie was standing in front of him with nothing at all between his legs.

Ishalla’s solicitor smirked. ‘Would you like me to explain the definition of indecent exposure? I believe the word genitals is involved…’


The victim’s son was waiting at Johnson’s desk. He dredged desperately through his mind – not two hours ago he had left him an exuberant voicemail celebrating the caging of the beast that had flashed his senile wheelchair bound old mother. The man stood, smiled apologetically, and held out to Johnson a small package wrapped inside a carrier bag.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t get this to you earlier, but mother was holding on to it, hid it under her knee blanket.’

There was barely any weight to the package. Johnson tried not to look ungrateful. Old ladies were always into baking and giving the police little presents. It was playing havoc with his waistline.

The man said, ‘It brought a glint to mother’s eye, I must say. She doesn’t move much anymore, the dementia, you know? Mad as a stoat one moment, then the next she’s lucid and spouting off about something that happened thirty years ago.’

Johnson began to unwrap the package. This one had the feel of a sausage roll, and he was suddenly aware that lunch had been hours ago.

The man donned his hat. He leaned in to whisper.

‘She was a bit of a good time girl in the war, you know? I guess the old reflexes kicked in.’